Bethel Re­fin­ing Quar­an­tine Process, Ex­pe­ri­ence

MISHAWAKA—Sev­eral stu­dents on Bethel Uni­ver­si­ty’s cam­pus have al­ready been through the quar­an­tine process at least once, some for only a cou­ple of days and some for the full two weeks. Ex­pe­ri­enc­ing min­i­mal hu­man con­tact for any pro­longed length of time is dif­fi­cult for most peo­ple and can add emo­tional stress to an al­ready un­usual year.  

Be­cause of the con­stant up­dates and changes be­ing made by the Cen­ters for Dis­ease Con­trol and Pre­ven­tion con­cern­ing safety guide­lines for COVID-19, Bethel has had to im­pro­vise and change its plans and pro­to­cols sev­eral times and is still re­fin­ing many of them, in­clud­ing the quar­an­tine process.  

Ac­cord­ing to Julie Beam, dean of stu­dents, Bethel ini­ti­ated a new email check-in sys­tem for quar­an­tined stu­dents on Mon­day, Sept. 21, to en­sure they are be­ing prop­erly cared for. 

“We did­n’t know how many stu­dents would be with us on cam­pus,” Beam said. “Our first goal was ac­tu­ally for an RD [Res­i­dent Di­rec­tor] or ath­letic trainer to check in every day with a phone call... we’ve re­al­ized we can’t main­tain that on a daily ba­sis like we had hoped.” 

The email asks stu­dents to an­swer four ba­sic ques­tions:  

• How are you feel­ing to­day? 
• What will you do for meals to­day? (only in­cluded for res­i­den­tial stu­dents) 

• How are your classes go­ing? 
• How are your spir­its to­day? 

Re­spond­ing to the emails is not man­dated, but Ad­min­is­tra­tion is ask­ing res­i­den­tial stu­dents to at least an­swer the ques­tion per­tain­ing to meals so they can ver­ify stu­dents are re­ceiv­ing food. 

Bethel is also cur­rently work­ing to cre­ate a more com­fort­able space in the dorm quar­an­tine rooms. 

“We’re try­ing to make sure each of those spaces has a re­frig­er­a­tor, a mi­crowave, and some kind of com­fort­able seat­ing,” Beam said. “Our next round... is lamps and some kind of dé­cor on the wall.” 

If a stu­dent has con­cerns or prob­lems dur­ing their quar­an­tine ex­pe­ri­ence, there are a few meth­ods he or she can use to reach out. 

“The RD is in the most on-the-ground po­si­tion to be able to ad­dress what­ever the con­cern is if they’re liv­ing on cam­pus,” Beam said. “They could cer­tainly re­spond to the email.” 

Due to pri­vacy guide­lines, Bethel staff and fac­ulty are not al­lowed to dis­close the names of in­di­vid­u­als in quar­an­tine, but the quar­an­tined stu­dents them­selves can reach out to their friends and fam­ily to let them know they’re in quar­an­tine and to so­cial­ize vir­tu­ally.  

Be­cause of the care­ful health pro­to­cols in place, there is of­ten a de­lay be­tween the time a stu­dent en­ters quar­an­tine and the time ad­min­is­tra­tion no­ti­fies pro­fes­sors that the stu­dent is in quar­an­tine; this pre­vents un­nec­es­sary con­fu­sion per­tain­ing to stu­dents who may only need to quar­an­tine for a day or two due to symp­toms that are be­ing caused by some­thing other than COVID-19.  

Fur­ther­more, some­times con­fu­sion has arisen around stu­dents who went into quar­an­tine on the same date but were re­leased on dif­fer­ent dates; in most cases, this is be­cause the quar­an­tine count­down be­gins based on when the stu­dent last in­ter­acted with some­one who tested pos­i­tive for or is sus­pected of hav­ing COVID-19, not based on when the stu­dent is ac­tu­ally quar­an­tined. There­fore, if stu­dents were ex­posed to the same per­son on dif­fer­ent dates, their start time will be the same but their end time will be dif­fer­ent. 

The Uni­ver­sity of Notre Dame has a dash­board to keep its com­mu­nity up­dated on the lat­est num­bers; Bethel has cho­sen not to do so, largely be­cause of the flu­id­ity of such sta­tis­tics. 

“The rea­son we’re not shar­ing num­bers reg­u­larly is be­cause they change lit­er­ally by the minute,” Beam said. “On both sides, there are stu­dents who are fin­ish­ing quar­an­tine and there are stu­dents who are need­ing to quar­an­tine... the num­bers are just ever fluc­tu­at­ing.” 

Beam said there is also con­cern that num­bers will be mis­un­der­stood or mis­con­strued. 

“That de­ci­sion is a Cab­i­net de­ci­sion,” Beam said. “The thought is that, be­cause we’re a smaller com­mu­nity than Notre Dame, we don’t have the same range of num­bers that could even ever be used... I don’t think our at­tempt is ever to keep peo­ple from know­ing what is go­ing on, it is to help man­age the in­for­ma­tion so that peo­ple know what they need to know and don’t mis­un­der­stand things that can cre­ate new fires.” 

Beams said that, over­all, the sys­tem seems to be do­ing its job. 

“As best we can un­der­stand it is work­ing -- it is help­ing to keep our case num­bers down,” Beam said. “We are track­ing with some other col­leges that are close to our size in In­di­ana... so, when we look at how things are go­ing there, it does seem like we have a pretty good han­dle on how this is play­ing out.” 

Bethel did re­lease a color-coded sys­tem as a gen­eral overview of our cur­rent sit­u­a­tion which can be viewed here. As of Mon­day, Sept. 28, Bethel is in the blue risk level. 

If stu­dents have con­cerns or ques­tions about any part of Bethel’s re­sponse to COVID-19, they can email the Covid Re­sponse Team at covidresponse@bethelu­ni­ver­sity.edu.